Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Tactics: Is TV Holding Back The Evolution of Football

From the danger of highlights to celebrity undermining the team, that box in your living room could be shaping the sport's future

There shouldn't necessarily be a point in Cristiano Ronaldo producing skill for skill's sake, but television laps it up. Photograph: Matthew Childs/Action Images

Television is football's demiurge. Depending on your view, it either brought the extraordinary wealth to the English game that allowed the Premier League to become one of Europe's two principal leagues, or it distributed those resources so unequally that the title race has become a procession of the weary old usual suspects. For better or worse, it sets the economics of the game, and dictates the rhythm of the footballing week.

So much is obvious, but what is rarely considered is that television could be shaping the way the game is played, and not necessarily for the better. It sounds, admittedly, a touch far-fetched, but two of football's most respected thinkers believe it to be true, and when Jorge Valdano and Arrigo Sacchi are in agreement, it is usually worth listening.

Killing the pause

For almost as long as football has existed, there have been complaints that it is too quick, that the skills of yesteryear have been supplanted by what, as early as the 1950s, the Austrian journalist Willy Meisl was terming "the fetishisation of speed". The likelihood is that the game will become ever quicker: Roberto Mancini, speaking at a conference in Belgrade, suggested that the tactical development of players was almost at its limit, but that the boundaries of their physical development were only just being pushed.

But for Valdano, the issue of speed is not merely to do with improved understanding of nutrition or physical conditioning. "I heard [the boxer] Carlos Monzón's trainer, Amilcar Brusa, explain that when a boxer fights on television, it's crucial he throw many punches, regardless of where they land," he said. "That's because television demands activity.

"It's the same with football. The game has become more intense than it needs to be. In South America we have the concept of the 'pause' in football, the moment of reflection which foreshadows an attack. It's built into the game, like music, which also needs pauses, drops in intensity. The problem is that this doesn't work in the language of television. A moment of low intensity in a televised football game is seen by some as time to change channels. So the game is getting quicker and quicker because television demands it."

Valdano is a romantic, and is evangelical about the importance of the pause, but here perhaps he has a point. It is probably not so direct a relationship as he makes out, but if television commentary and punditry creates - or at least reinforces - a culture in which thoughtful play is dismissed as boring and harum-scarum running and clattering tackles are praised as representative of the seductive hurly-burly of the Premier League, then ultimately that will have an impact.

The danger of the clip

Ask pretty much anybody to describe England's third goal against Holland in Euro 96, and they will speak of Teddy Sheringham dummying to shoot, then opening his body and laying the ball off for Alan Shearer to smash a controlled slice past Edwin van der Sar and into the top corner. Which is fine, in as much as Sheringham's lay-off demonstrated a fine awareness of his surroundings, great unselfishness and a deft touch, but the move began far earlier, and was glorious in its entirety.

Tony Adams won possession, anticipating and intercepting after Ronald de Boer had miscontrolled a Michael Reiziger clearance. He strode forward, before letting Paul Gascoigne take over 10 yards inside the Dutch half. He switched the ball left for Darren Anderton, and then received the return just in from the left touchline. As Clarence Seedorf closed him down, he rolled the ball back with the sole of his boot, creating room for a jabbed ball inside to Steve McManaman, who played an exquisite chipped return, arcing the ball over Reiziger and into Gascoigne's path as he made a forward charge. Gascoigne showed great strength to hold off Aron Winter, barrelling into the box and drawing Danny Blind before stabbing the ball back with the outside of his right foot to Sheringham, who sensed Johan De Kock closing in and pushed the ball right to Shearer.

The point is that every bit of the move was brilliant, and McManaman's chip to Gascoigne was a technically harder thing to do and displayed greater vision and imagination even than Sheringham's lay-off. But it is forgotten because of television's habit of focusing on the money shot. That is natural and understandable - the point of a highlight, after all, is to take only a few seconds - but the build-up, whether it includes a Valdanista pause or not, is vital, otherwise you end up in Charles Reep territory, focusing only on end results and not the processes by which they are achieved.

More damaging, though, is probably television's habit of focusing on skill: the moody close up of Cristiano Ronaldo performing step-overs or ofZinedine Zidane pirouetting. Skill is a good thing, of course, but it must be focused: there is no point in skill for skill's sake, and when context is removed the sense is lost of why a player produced a trick at that moment.

The danger is that players become focused on their showreels at the expense of the game itself, or that young players learn how to flick the ball over their heads rather than learning about the shape of the game (and shape isn't just a concern of defenders: I went to interview Samuel Eto'o once and found him watching what appeared to be a Middle Eastern league game on television. I asked what it was, to which he replied that he didn't know, but that he would watch any football to study the pattern).

The focus on tricks is a trend only likely to be accentuated by programmes such as Wayne Rooney's Street Striker, and the danger is that football produces a generation of posturing show ponies incapable of producing the incisive pass or making the right run. All young players should remember the example of Sonny Pike, who joined Ajax in 1996 at the age of seven, heralded by numerous clips of him performing complicated keepie-up routines, but never kicked a ball in league football. It is tempting, too, to wonder whether a player such as, say, Danny Murphy has suffered the opposite effect, never quite enjoying the recognition he deserves because he is not flashy enough.

Celebrity and the undermining of system

Sacchi maintains that tactics have not evolved since he led Milan to back-to-back Champions League successes in 1989 and 1990, something he says is "remarkable, worrying". That is possibly an overstatement, for since then 4-2-3-1 has been popularised, 3-5-2 has spluttered into semi-obsolescence, and the false 9 and strikerlessness have flickered towards viability, and yet he is right to the extent that nobody since has been so dedicated to system.

Both Sacchi and Valery Lobanovskyi demanded the sublimation of the individual to the needs of the collective. That took long, hard, boring hours on the training field, and players who were willing to perform unglamorous tasks for the good of the team. In that, Lobanovskyi was probably helped at Dynamo Kyiv by the prevailing ideology, but it was arguably Sacchi's greatest achievement at Milan that, at least initially, he persuaded the likes of Marco van Basten and Ruud Gullit to put their egos to one side.

It seems logical that the increased sophistication of data collection since then should have led to increasingly sophisticated systems, but it has not. For that there are two reasons: firstly, the increased number of games brought about by the expansion of the Champions League has led to a general acceptance of the desirability – probably the necessity – of rotation; and secondly, the increasing self-importance and contractual flexibility of players means many are unwilling to so submit themselves to a manger's demands. Television, of course, has played its part in both developments.

Rotation means that players do not generate the same mutual understanding as they did when teams regularly went unchanged - or switched only a player or two - from week to week. It is far easier for 11 to achieve a mutual understanding when being selected from a basic pool of 15 or so than from 25. An effective system only comes about after months of intensive practice, a factor that hindered both Lobanovskyi and Sacchi at international level.

But it is celebrity players with puffed-up egos and the freedom to walk out on clubs that Sacchi sees as the real problem. "Today's football is about managing the characteristics of individuals," he said. "And that's why you see the proliferation of specialists. The individual has trumped the collective. But it's a sign of weakness. It's reactive, not pro-active."

That, he believes, is the fundamental flaw in the galacticos policy at Real Madrid, where he served as director of football between December 2004 and December 2005. "There was no project," he explained. "It was about exploiting qualities. So, for example, we knew that Zidane, Raúl and Figo didn't track back, so we had to put a guy in front of the back four who would defend. But that's reactionary football. It doesn't multiply the players' qualities exponentially. Which actually is the point of tactics: to achieve this multiplying effect on the players' abilities.

"In my football, the regista - the playmaker - is whoever had the ball. But if you have [Claude] Makélélé, he can't do that. He doesn't have the ideas to do it although, of course, he's great at winning the ball. It's become all about specialists. Is football a collective and harmonious game? Or is it a question of putting x amount of talented players in and balancing them out with y amount of specialists?"

Whether the second galacticos era follows the same path as the first or not, any success they have will be down not to a tactical plan but simply to weight of talent, and it is that which saddens Sacchi. There is a sense that Real Madrid are a side bought not for how they will play together, but how they will look in the next advertisment. That may be a sad reflection of a world increasingly driven by financial demands, but there is a positive: so long as the richest clubs are playing the football of the individual, smaller clubs playing the football of the team still have a chance.

Perhaps it has always been the case that the lust for glamour has sat uneasily with the game's systematisation, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Sacchi is right. Football may have developed in other ways, but in terms of a systematised approach demanding self-sacrifice from the components within it, his Milan stands as the evolutionary end-point, and television has played its part in that.

Quote of the moment

Defying belief however, is a market Benitez has cornered quite well. The moment you think Benitez is clueless, he defies it by pulling off a result of majesty, like the one achieved in Madrid. The moment he is hailed a genius, he masterminds toothless surrender to a team going nowhere. In the ongoing Anfield power struggle, just when he was cornered by the firing squad, the Spaniard's demise at Liverpool looking practically assured with the ominous suspension of betting by the bookmakers, he squeezes out through a narrow trapdoor and eliminates Rick Parry. Rafa Benitez is Keyzer Soze.

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